There were 51,008 doctoral degrees granted in the US in 2012. The top five doctoral-granting states were California, New York, Texas, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. Of these graduate students, the vast majority are American citizens.

Since May of last year, many currencies are quickly falling against the US dollar, including the graphed emerging-market currencies. The Canadian dollar, not charted here, also fell 10% during this time period against the US dollar.

The truism that movies are (much) longer than they used to be is not accurate. Since 1960, movie lengths have not substantially changed. Since the 1990’s they have increased, on average, by about five minutes.

US teen employment usually trends downward after a minimum wage hike, but only temporarily. In 1996, however, it continued climbing after the hike. The 2007 teen employment downturn was hugely exacerbated by the recession.

Inter-generational social mobility in the US, recently suspected to be in decline, is actually quite stable. What is quite different, however, is the geography of mobility. Some metro areas experience great mobility, others have dire generational poverty issues. So the overall pattern has not changed, but the part of America a child is born into greatly affects lifetime mobility. The highest mobility is in Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, and San Jose. The lowest is in Raleigh, Atlanta, and Charlotte.

A combination of calming political situations in numerous oil producing countries combined with enormous gains in US oil production will likely result in deflation for all of the Western world. Inflation rates in the US and parts of Europe are already near or below 1% and there is little indication the trend will reverse, especially if oil prices slide substantially. The US is expected to equal or surpass Saudia Arabia’s oil production level by 2016.

This chart shows the probability various types of jobs will be largely automated in the next twenty years. Click through for a thorough investigation of robots and labor automation over the next few decades. In general, routine jobs will be increasingly automated, while emotional and human-judgement jobs will resist automation.

Overall underemployment rates for recent college grads is similar to levels in the early 1990’s. The main difference, as seen in the bottom chart, is that the share of recent grads with low wage jobs has increased substantially, even though the overall rate hasn’t changed much.